Michel Onfray

Michel Onfray is a French philosopher. Born to a family of Norman farmers, he graduated with a Ph.D. in philosophy. He taught this subject to senior students at a technical high school in Caen between 1983 and 2002, before establishing what he and his supporters call the Université populaire de Caen, proclaiming its foundation on a free-of-charge basis, and the manifesto written by Onfray in 2004 (La communauté philosophique). However, the title 'Popular University' is misleading, although attractive, as this 'University' provides no services other than the occasional delivery of lectures - there is no register of students, no examination or assessment, and no diplomas. After all, 'ordinary' French University lectures are open to all, free

If you like author Michel Onfray here is the list of authors you may also like

Buy books on Amazon

Total similar authors (27)

David Stasavage

David Stasavage is the Julius Silver Professor in NYU’s Department of Politics and an Affiliated Professor in NYU’s School of Law, as well as its Department of History. He uses both current and historical data to investigate long run trends in inequality and in the development of state institutions. Recently, together with Ken Scheve at Stanford, he published Taxing The Rich, a book that charts the evolution of progressive taxation in twenty countries over the last two centuries. Before that he published States of Credit and Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State, two books in which he explored the joint development of representative government and public borrowing in Europe during the medieval and early modern periods. David has
Buy books on Amazon
Adrian Greaves

Adrian Greaves is the founder of the Anglo-Zulu War Historical Society and the author of numerous books on the period and South African wars.
Buy books on Amazon
Pierre Grimal

Admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1933, and receiving a third in the "Agrégation des lettres" in 1935, he was member of the French School at Rome (1935-1937) then taught Latin at a Rennes lycée. Then he was active as a professor of Roman civilization at the faculties of Caen and Bordeaux, and finally at the Sorbonne for thirty years.
He published studies on the Roman civilization, of which many volumes to the "Que sais-je?" series, and translations of Latin classical authors (Cicero, Seneca the Younger, Tacitus, Plautus, Terence). On his retirement, he also published biographies and fictionalized histories (Mémoires d’Agrippine, le procès Néron), more intended for the general public.
At the end of his life, he campaigned for the saf
Buy books on Amazon
Robert A. Heinlein

Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. Sometimes called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was among the first to emphasize scientific accuracy in his fiction, and was thus a pioneer of the subgenre of hard science fiction. His published works, both fiction and non-fiction, express admiration for competence and emphasize the value of critical thinking. His plots often posed provocative situations which challenged conventional social mores. His work continues to have an influence on the science-fiction genre, and on modern culture more generally.
Heinlein became one of the first American science-fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Eveni
Buy books on Amazon
Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against A
Buy books on Amazon
Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre
Buy books on Amazon
Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister
Buy books on Amazon
Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens was a British-American author, journalist, and literary critic known for his sharp wit, polemical writing, and outspoken views on religion, politics, and culture. He was a prolific essayist and columnist, contributing to publications such as The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, and The Nation.
A staunch critic of totalitarianism and organized religion, Hitchens became one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his time. His book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) became a bestseller and solidified his place as a leading figure in the New Atheism movement. He was equally fearless in political criticism, taking on figures across the ideological spectrum, from Henry Kissinger (The Trial of Henry K
Buy books on Amazon
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (谷崎潤一郎) was a Japanese author, and one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature, perhaps the most popular Japanese novelist after Natsume Sōseki.

Some of his works present a rather shocking world of sexuality and destructive erotic obsessions; others, less sensational, subtly portray the dynamics of family life in the context of the rapid changes in 20th-century Japanese society.

Frequently his stories are narrated in the context of a search for cultural identity in which constructions of "the West" and "Japanese tradition" are juxtaposed. The results are complex, ironic, demure, and provocative.
Buy books on Amazon
Arthur C. Clarke

Stories, works of noted British writer, scientist, and underwater explorer Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, include 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

This most important and influential figure in 20th century fiction spent the first half of his life in England and served in World War II as a radar operator before migrating to Ceylon in 1956. He co-created his best known novel and movie with the assistance of Stanley Kubrick.

Clarke, a graduate of King's College, London, obtained first class honours in physics and mathematics. He served as past chairman of the interplanetary society and as a member of the academy of astronautics, the royal astronomical society, and many other organizations.

He authored more than fifty books and won his numerous aw
Buy books on Amazon
Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.

In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from
Buy books on Amazon
Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century philosopher from Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He's regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe & of the late Enlightenment. His most important work is The Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics & epistemology, & highlights his own contribution to these areas. Other main works of his maturity are The Critique of Practical Reason, which is about ethics, & The Critique of Judgment, about esthetics & teleology.

Pursuing metaphysics involves asking questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed thru epistemology. He suggested that by understanding the so
Buy books on Amazon
Charles Baudelaire

Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later symbolist and modernist poets.

Reputation of Charles Pierre Baudelaire rests primarily on perhaps the most important literary art collection, published in Europe in the 19th century. Similarly, his early experiment Petits poèmes en prose (1868) ( Little Prose Poems ) most succeeded and innovated of the time.

From financial disaster to prosecution for blasphemy, drama and strife filled life of known Baudelaire with highly controversial and often dark tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Long after his death, his name represents depravity and vice. He se
Buy books on Amazon
Amélie Nothomb

Amélie Nothomb, born Fabienne Claire Nothomb, was born in Etterbeek, Belgium on 9 July 1966, to Belgian diplomats. Although Nothomb claims to have been born in Japan, she actually began living in Japan at the age of two until she was five years old. Subsequently, she lived in China, New York, Bangladesh, Burma, the United Kingdom (Coventry) and Laos.
She is from a distinguished Belgian political family; she is notably the grand-niece of Charles-Ferdinand Nothomb, a Belgian foreign minister (1980-1981). Her first novel, Hygiène de l'assassin, was published in 1992. Since then, she has published approximately one novel per year with a.o. Les Catilinaires (1995), Stupeur Et Tremblements (1999) and Métaphysique des tubes (2000).

She has been awar
Buy books on Amazon
Emil M. Cioran

Born in 1911 in Rășinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest.

A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).
Buy books on Amazon
Rüdiger Safranski

Rüdiger Safranski is a German literary scholar and author. He has been Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the Free University of Berlin since 2012.
Buy books on Amazon
Franz-Olivier Giesbert

Franz-Olivier Giesbert est un journaliste, présentateur de télévision et écrrivain français.
Buy books on Amazon
Éric Vuillard

Born in Lyons in 1968, Éric Vuillard is a French author and film director. His books include Conquistadors (winner of the Ignatius J. Reilly prize 2010), and La Bataille de l'occident and Congo, for both of which he was awarded the 2012 Franz-Hessel prize and the 2013 Valery-Larbaud prize. Sorrow of the Earth is the first of his titles to be translated into English.
Buy books on Amazon
Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher (1968 – 2017) was a co-founder of Zero Books and Repeater Books. His blog, k-punk, defined critical writing for a generation. He wrote three books, Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie, and was a Visiting Fellow in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Buy books on Amazon
Albert Camus

Works, such as the novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), of Algerian-born French writer and philosopher Albert Camus concern the absurdity of the human condition; he won the Nobel Prize of 1957 for literature.

Origin and his experiences of this representative of non-metropolitan literature in the 1930s dominated influences in his thought and work.

He also adapted plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Requiem for a Nun of William Faulkner. One may trace his enjoyment of the theater back to his membership in l'Equipe, an Algerian group, whose "collective creation" Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons.

Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectu
Buy books on Amazon
Byung-Chul Han

Byung-Chul Han, also spelled Pyŏng-ch'ŏl Han (born 1959 in Seoul), is a German author, cultural theorist, and Professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) in Berlin, Germany.

Byung-Chul Han studied metallurgy in Korea before he moved to Germany in the 1980s to study Philosophy, German Literature and Catholic theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich. He received his doctoral degree at Freiburg with a dissertation on Martin Heidegger in 1994.

In 2000, he joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Basel, where he completed his Habilitation. In 2010 he became a faculty member at the HfG Karlsruhe, where his areas of interest were philosophy of the 18th, 19th and 20th century, ethics, social philosophy, phenomenology, cult
Buy books on Amazon
Alan W. Watts

Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer and speaker, who held both a Master's in Theology and a Doctorate of Divinity. Famous for his research on comparative religion, he was best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Asian philosophies for a Western audience. He wrote over 25 books and numerous articles on subjects such as personal identity, the true nature of reality, higher consciousness, the meaning of life, concepts and images of God and the non-material pursuit of happiness. In his books he relates his experience to scientific knowledge and to the teachings of Eastern and Western religion and philosophy.
Buy books on Amazon
John Gray

John Nicholas Gray is a English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.
Buy books on Amazon
Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz (Arabic author profile: نجيب محفوظ) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He published over 50 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films.
Buy books on Amazon
A. Dan

Daniel ALEXANDRE, dit A.Dan, débute comme formateur en informatique et en maths, avant de faire du dessin son métier. Il travaille en tant qu'illustrateur dans le domaine de la nature et du tourisme, puis rejoint Grand Angle pour dessiner Tahya El-Djazaïr.

http://www.angle.fr/dessinateur-a-dan...
Buy books on Amazon
Catherine Nixey

Catherine Nixey is a journalist and a classicist. Her mother was a nun, her father was a monk, and she was brought up Catholic. She studied classics at Cambridge and taught the subject for several years before becoming a journalist on the arts desk at the Times (UK), where she still works. The Darkening Age, winner of a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award, is her first book. She lives in London.
Buy books on Amazon
Franz-Olivier Giesbert

Franz-Olivier Giesbert est un journaliste, présentateur de télévision et écrrivain français.
Buy books on Amazon